


A New Dusk

by CSM_Scriptator



Category: Robin of Sherwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-03 22:56:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4117786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CSM_Scriptator/pseuds/CSM_Scriptator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People still need heroes, and it is Herne who sends them</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Dreams

If he had been honest with himself, Gisburne had always known that this day would come. And, in his heart, he’d known it would come in the late summer, with the turning of the leaves, just as harvest approached.

Not that it was his business any more, except that he lived there, on the estate that had been all the reward he’d got for his services, and that grudgingly. Robert the Sheriff had promised it to him, and more, but the wound which de Rainault had taken then turned poisoned and he was dead before he could seal the deeds – if he’d ever had them scribed, that was – and Hugo the Abbot, in between pigging down the oysters and Rheinish wine he’d grown to love, had insisted that his brother had left everything to Mother Church. Then he, too, had been taken ill – just when the Archbishop had been on the point of examining certain books – and died in his turn. The Lea Grange (an irony that – an appendage to Sir Richard’s lands, prior to his death and Robert’s seizure of his estates) had been unsettled, and Gisburne had moved in, to conserve it, and eventually had had the lands granted to him, in absence of better claimant. It, and Elizabeth, distant cousin to Marion, who was now Sister Perpetua. As a penance it hadn’t seemed that harsh.

And now the whole thing, like an oak, weakened in a storm, threatened to crash down, as the autumn rains swept in.

“You can be preserver or destroyer,” the voice had said, in his dreams: “Great things lie within you. What was, can be again, but now with the wisdom of maturity.”

And there had been the images – the Forest, the villages, the hidden Lake, the sword and the bow, and the hood.

 

“I have a wife,” he had said to the voice.

“You have love,” Herne’s voice had replied: “Love is everywhere – it links all Together. But true love is Service.”

 

He had a small household, and among them an elderly Saxon called Hiw, who served as his bailiff. Gisburne haled the man out and told him that, for the present, he should act as steward of the Grange, answering to Elizabeth.

To his wife he simply said that he had to go on a journey, but that he would send word.

Then he saddled the horse Fate had left him with, and set off into the Forest. Not that he knew where he was going, but in his former days the wolves-heads had seemed, somehow, to move through Sherwood without any difficulty.

 

The Lake, when he reached it, was wreathed in mist. A boat – a flat-bottomed thing, with a single, long-shafted, leaf-bladed scull to drive it – floated, waiting.

Gisburne tethered the horse to a scrubby bush, got aboard the boat, and took up the scull, uncertain of where he was meant to go. But as soon as he placed the oar in the water the boat began to move, carving its way through the mist, until Gisburne was afloat in a swirling cloud of whiteness. And then the mist parted, to reveal a low ledge and a cave behind.

And Herne – or, rather, a man in a deerskin, with wild branches for hair or horns.

“Follow me – you are come at the Time, and in the Manner shalt thou be equipped.”


	2. Following the Deer

The sword wasn’t Albion. Which was, in way, good – had it been, Gisburne would have had to ask how it had come to be there, when he knew it had been cast into one of the sinkholes under Nottingham Castle after Robert the Sheriff’s demise. This one was ‘Galtres’, and though Herne wouldn’t discuss it, Gisburne was sure that the name was a reference to the legendary Fisher King.

  
The bow also was different. Both of the wolves-heads – Loxley and Huntingdon – had wielded English long-bows. For Gisburne, Herne had a shorter, horn-backed bow, such as had come back from the Crusades to Outremer.

  
“It is yours,” Herne said. “But you will find another who will use it for you.”

  
“I thought ... “

  
“The Hooded Man is one, yes. But the Forest is more than one tree, and the brotherhood of all admits of smaller companies within itself.”

  
The hood was just as he’d remembered it: leather – or hide – with a splay that covered the shoulders, and a deep cowl to keep his face shadowed.

  
“I need not,” Herne said, “school you in arms. It is the Forest you must learn. Go back, and follow the stag. When you lose the stag, you will find your purpose.”

 

In somewhat of a daze, Gisburne let himself be led back outside, sword at his side, bow in his hand, to the boat. And again it seemed to steer itself, back across the lake to where his horse stood. But, even as he stepped ashore, he saw the stag – a great fourteen-pointer – crouched in the underbrush, browsing on a low branch.  
And at once the spirit swept over him and he stopped only to loose the horse from its tether before following the majestic beast into the shadows of Sherwood.

 

 

An hour later, and thoroughly lost, he was on the top edge of a narrow, steep-sided pathway through one of the rocky rises that punctuated the hidden heart of the Forest. He was about to give up and go home when a voice drifted up, along with a whiff of wood-smoke.

  
“We’ll get the girls and bring them back ‘ere,” a thick Flemish-accented voice said. “Thomas and Guider will halt at the first narrow point and hold off anyone who comes after till we signal. Joc and Phuyn will carry on as far as the mouth of the cave. Once we’re all safe, Maartin will go to the priest and tell him that we’ll let them go again for a hundred schillings.”  
“But ... we bain’t goin’ let ‘em go, be we ?”

  
“No,” the Flamand said, with a growl, “But your priest won’t know that, and the money’ll be a little bonus.”

  
“And the Master ?”

“Well, I shall’nt tell ‘im – which of you will ?”

  
There was a pause, and the sound of a blade being steeled, and then a new voice asked a question: “The villagers won’t pay, and what will we do about the foresters ?”

  
“They’re Normands – they won’t help Saxons. Besides, they look to the Sheriff for orders – by the time he finds out, even if he cares, the girls will be dead and we’ll be away.”

  
“Dead ?” a younger voice asked.

  
“Of course,” the leader replied: “Himself will provide what we’ll need – the peasants know that he asked of them and now we have to show those scum that He’s serious – if they don’t obey Him, we have to follow through, or the next village won’t knuckle under. But we keep His two from among the girls alive.”

  
“But what if the village pay ?”

  
The leader’s voice turned dark and threatening: “Do you want anyone left alive who can identify us, idiot ?”

 

 

Gisburne’s blood seethed – he might barely tolerate the Saxons, but these cut-throats – dismissed, no doubt, from the Royal army after the last Continental campaign and now marauding where they might – they were no friends to him, to England, to anyone. And he had Elizabeth to think of, too. If they were planning on killing Saxons, they might think a lone Norman, with Saxon servants, a good prospect as well.

  
And it sounded as if there was someone behind them, who might well be a greater threat unchecked.


	3. Sutton ... and Beyond

It was a foul plot and Gisburne burned to prevent it. But he was one man – what could he do ?

 

Then he remembered Loxley – and Huntingdon – the villages had helped them, hidden them, fed them, worked with them sometimes.

 

But he was neither Robin the peasant nor Robert the lord’s son – and most of the villages of their day were ruined now, after the excesses of de Rainault and his successors had cut their heart from them, taking the men for labour, the children for servants, their women ... Had he, Gisburne wondered, as their captain-at-arms, been any better than the Flamands ?

 

There wasn’t time for such thoughts, though. But he had no idea of which village the Flamands meant to plunder for their hostages ...

 

And then, into the eye of his mind came a place, and a name: Wickham was gone, and Elsdon, but he had heard men speak of Sutton as a well-to-do place. And there was a priest nearby – the leader of the Flamands had talked about a priest: one of his men was to deliver the ransom demand there.

 

Carefully he steered his horse away from the edge, and then set himself to reaching Sutton as quickly as he might.

 

 

 

Sutton, when he reached it, was in ferment, and the initial reaction, when he could get anyone’s attention, and could ask for the village’s headman, was one of hostility. But then someone said something (later on, he was to learn that they had seen the hood around his shoulders) and one of the children ran to spread the news.

 

Raedsaerl had been headman at Sutton for eight years and, mercifully, once he’d got over the idea of the Hooded Man being a Norman, he was willing to speak and explain.

 

“If you are him, then we need you,” he said tersely. “Men came, this afternoon, when most of us were in the fields – they took the girl-children – eight of them. We barely saw them – they didn’t look like .... well, outlaws ...   We’re going to see if we can trace which way they went, and get the girls back.”

 

“Don’t,” Gisburne said: “It will be an ambush. Your girls were taken by Flamands. “

 

While he was saying this Gisburne was trying to make sense of what had happened .... then, suddenly, he realised that he had made the assumption that that the Flamands in the ravine had been the only ones – clearly there had been an advance party, who had already been out seizing the hostages, while Gisburne had been overhearing the plan.

 

“So how do we get the girls back ?” Raedsaerl asked.

 

“Do you have a priest ?”

 

“Father Matthew lives ‘bout a mile back, by the riven oak – we can’t afford our own church but he comes and priests for us, and for three other villages.”

 

“Well,” Gisburne said: “I ... that is, the power of Herne has told me, that someone will go there to demand a ransom for your daughters. If we were able to – ”

 

“To ambush him !” one man said enthusiastically.

 

“I was rather thinking we would follow him, to find out exactly where the girls were being held, before harm could come to them.”

 

 

It ought to have been easy ... had these peasants had the discipline of the men whom Gisburne had once commanded. In the event, however, it proved impossible to deflect the wilder heads from the idea of direct pursuit (though their leader, one Alfred, swore that they would retreat at the first sign of the supposed ambush).

 

“What are we to do mean time ?” Raedsaerl asked.

 

“You must send someone to your Father Matthew – and I need a guide to the oak myself, so that I can be there to watch.”

 

 

The oak was, indeed, riven – it looked as though by man rather than the elements, though – and boasted a small shrine at its foot. Riding, following the directions he’d been given, Gisburne reached it before any of the villagers, and was in time to see a burly man ride away on a poorly-maintained nag.

 

He considered taking time to check that he had indeed seemed Maartin, but he didn’t want to take the risk of losing the man, in the failing light. His own horse had no difficulty in keeping up, but keeping out of sight ...

 

Three times Maartin looked back, and each time Gisburne braced himself to have to gallop in to the attack, but the man missed his shadower each time. Then he turned from the main trail onto a narrower side path and after about a quarter mile came to a low rock outcrop ... which Gisburne remembered de Rainault had sent men to quarry in case there had been precious metal.

 

So, this, presumably, was the cave of which the leader had spoken.

 

Which raised the matter of the whereabouts of the girls ....

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 2nd RoS, again taken from old Diary pieces. Will, slowly, be expanded to full story


End file.
